After a catastrophic 38-train car derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, some officials are raising concerns about a type of toxic substance that tends to stay in the environment.
Last week, Sherrod Brown and J.D. Vance, the U.S. senators from Ohio, sent a letter to the state’s environmental protection agency expressing concern that dioxins may have been released when some of the chemicals in the damaged railcars were deliberately burned for safety reasons. They joined residents of the small Midwestern town and environmentalists from around the U.S. calling for state and federal environmental agencies to test the soil around the site where the tanker cars tipped over.
But the main pathway that dioxin gets into human bodies is not directly through something burning like the contents of the East Palestine tanker cars. It’s through consumption of meat, dairy, fish and shellfish that have become contaminated. That contamination takes time. Which is likely why residents, politicians, environmentalists and public health professionals are all calling for state and federal environmental agencies to conduct testing at the derailment site.There is already some level of dioxins in the environment — they can be created by certain industrial processes, or even by people burning trash in their backyards, McBride said.
Eventually, those dioxins could make their way up the food chain to human consumers. Bioaccumulation means that more dioxin can get into humans than what's found in the environment after the crash.
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